Here it goes:
“Machines are designed
not to make mistakes, in our behaviour we often make mistakes, so why not
machines also. I add that reality to it. So it’s not destruction but an
addition.”
Yasunao Tone,
.Sound artist, Fluxus artist, composer, all-round
provocateur
Sound
Art
The
history of sound art has been a case of displacement and misplacement. It has
been displaced due to the nature of the medium – sound, a phenomenon which is
heard and felt but not seen. In a visually dominated world like ours, this
spelt the relegation of the importance of sound and audio sensitivity in a
human’s perception, cognition and consciousness. It is misplaced as it is more
often categorically subsumed under the other art form, music: it is either considered
as modern composition, noise, free improvisation or electronica. Sound art is
in fact one of the most ancient of art forms when the name of Greek god of
wind, Aeolus, was used to christened the Aeolian harp. The harp is a wooden
instrument well-known in the ancient world in the West which is played not by a
human agent but instead, via the force of nature, wind. The first instance of
sound art is thus both a tribute to the powers of the supernatural as well as
the revelling of nature.
Sound
art in the late 20th century and early 21st century is
often defined by academics and critics as a new and novel form of art[1].
Once again it is another case of displacement and misplacement. For the former
situation, sound art is posited as the use of sound to continue the pathway
opened up by conceptual artists since the 1960s, albeit focusing on the sonic
canvas, the unseen vibrations in the air. For the latter, it is usually
described as a-political or a-social as the emphasis is always about the sonic
properties and its aesthetics and only that[2].
The traditional art criticism and art historical writing of the symbiotic
relationships between artwork and the society and political milieu which spawn
them are almost always left out. If any mention of the society and politics is
included, it is usually tacked conveniently under the general biographies of
the artists without further cross-studying of the artists’ work with that of
their socio-economic context.
The
two case studies which will be discussed in this paper will foreground the
social and political contexts of the artists as well as their responses to
these socio-political conditions to demonstrate that sound art, just like any
other art forms like paintings, music and theatre, is reflexive of the times of
the creators, and more. The two sound artists are from Japan, a country which
due to its unique post-World War II history as well as its past before the
Pacific War, but they exemplify two different takes on their socio-economic and
political settings since the 1960s. Both artists were born and brought up
during the most tumultuous period of time in 20th century Japan.
Both grew up in the strangely schizophrenic era of initial post-War humiliation
and extreme poverty and then, taking an abrupt about-turn swiftly to become one
of the most powerful nations, economically, within a short span of ten years
(late 1940s to late 1950s). The military antagonisms against the USA during the
War from 1941 to the devastation of two Japanese cities from the deadliest
man-made weapons ever, the atomic bombs in 1945, created a permanent mark in
the national psyche of the Japanese people. The Americans then, due to Cold War
politics, decided to resurrect Japan as quickly as possible as it was viewed
strategically as a viable ally in its containment of the Communist states in
Asia. This led to the subsequent sponsoring of the defeated nation economically
to boost its drained capacity to that of global status by the 1960s[3].
The tension of such rapid and fortuitous turn-of-event for Japan was viewed
apprehensively by many Japanese who experienced these rapidly changing
developments.
On
one hand the influx of Euro-American ideas and products fed the hunger of the
Japanese to seek actively for something elsewhere to replace the failed
militaristic and culturally/historically-derived nationalism of the previous
decades and many saw the opportunities opened up in the post-war years as a
great avenue to change Japan fundamentally from its conservative and conformist
traditions[4].
On the other hand however, many also questioned the rampant consumerist-driven materialism
brought in by the Americans as threatening the values and morals of the people.
Their criticism also extended to the acute commodification of almost everything
around them. This dichotomy thus presented to the artists, writers and all with
the necessary fuel to channel their personal critique on the politics and
society of Japan.
One
interesting trait which is discernible in many of the Japanese art collectives
and artists emerging in the 1950s and 1960s demonstrated clear debt to their
Japanese culture – the emphasis on simplicity, inter-connectedness of things
and the disregard of western notion of categorisation, genre and form as well
as the foregrounding of the concept of non-permanence which one can not only
attribute to certain aspects of Japanese aesthetics but to Zen Buddhism and
Shintoism as well. Key groups like Gutai, Fluxus Japan and Monoha are just some
of the more historically well-known examples[5].
The
two following case studies will highlight the significance of such influences
and traits commonly found in Japanese artists as well as pointing out how these
artists channel some of these sensibilities to their choice of art medium –
sound.
Back
to Nature: A case study of Akio Suzuki
Born
in 1941 in the then Japanese colony of Korea, Akio Suzuki, were repatriated
back to Japan with his parents after the War. Due to the huge import of
Euro-American influences culturally, he was exposed to the ideas of iconoclasts
like John Cage and David Tudor and their then revolutionary introduction of
chance and conceptual understanding of the arts[6].
In 1963, he was working in an architect’s office and he came upon a curious
thought. He was examining the possibility of making a staircase which would not
tire out the users but in fact provide pleasure for whoever stepping on it when
it stirred in him the novel idea of a perfect staircase which would look like a
musical stave and thus if he dropped a ping pong ball down it, the sounds it
created should correspondingly be beautiful. This spurred him on to start on
his first actions, which Suzuki coined Self
Study Events[7].
He went to a train station in Nagoya and he tipped a dustbin down a staircase.
The sounds created was horrible and he was in fact, looked on with disdain by
the public as many of them picked up the rubbish which was scattered all over
the base of the staircase (Fig. 1). It was perceived by the other Japanese as
an act of public nuisance and inappropriate social behaviour. Undeterred, he
threw down another bin and this time round he was arrested by the police[8].
Suzuki’s first work was both norm-challenging and thought-provoking for the
etiquette-particular Japanese society.
Similar
to many Happenings which were taking place in the major cities of Japan due to
the absorption of such marvellous creative but provocative acts towards the
society in the West, the authority and the crass consumerism many of these
artists witnessed around them, Suzuki found that the experiments (like the one
described above) to be unsatisfactorily and he decided to hit the books to help
boost himself intellectually to help him understand the world around better.
This was, he hoped, to provide ideas for him to come up with more meaningful
and more impactful artistic endeavours in the future. He subsequently developed
his next stage of works entitled, Throwing
and Following. He would project sound into a space and he would follow the
consequential resonance of it in the time and space. This opened him up to a better
understanding of the objects around him and in turn he could use them more
effectively to generate sounds in spaces[9].
He thus gradually grasped the interactivity between material, sonic properties
of objects and the resonances and echoes produced which then fed into his
mature works in the 1970s.
In
the 1970s he hand-crafted one of his most signature sound art tools, the
Analapos. It is built from two cylindrical resonators
connected long springs. The instrument explores the reverberation of springs,
the resonance of vessels and the transmission of signals between two physically
linked terminals. The tool also reacts differently from space to space as the
reverberation and resonances generated vary from one venue to another. The
simplicity of the tools betrayed a few principal ideals of Suzuki: his subtle
commentary on the hyper-modernisation of the Japanese society and the growing
estrangement between individuals in such a materialist-driven, dog-eat-dog
environment with the overemphasis on science, technology and human agency. Just
like most of his sound art pieces/performance works, Suzuki wants to reclaim
the human-ness of art by consciously incorporating human interaction when using
the tools/instruments. He also wants to alert his audience/listeners to pay attention
to their surroundings once again. He has since the 1970s increasingly performed
in open or natural settings, inviting the audiences to join him in such
back-to-nature creation of his sound art. This can perhaps be linked back to
the Japanese religious and aesthetical reverence of nature. The famous Ryoanji
Temple in Kyoto is a case in point and it is just one of the more famous ones
anyone could think of. Kyoto city alone is literally peppered with shrines and
temples of such.
Coming
back to the Analapos, its use in the wide-open natural context can reap hugely
surprising results as the tool reacts in novel manners with the winds, the
humidity, the openness and altitude of the space as well as the resonating
human bodies in its vicinity[10].
No single event can be repeated. This reflects prominently the unpredictability
of nature and the state of our world and sometimes humans cannot do much beyond
just marvel at such phenomena.
He
also created site-specific events which involved the audience to travel to a
space close his current residence in Tango, Japan, to immerse themselves in the
piece with him, his installation space and the elements. Suzuki calls the venue
his dream space and he constructed and coined it Space in the Sun. The venue is
found on a mountain top in rural Tango under the direct purview of the sun. The
site consists of two crumbling and identical 17 metre by 3.5 metre facing
walls. The walls were built from 20,000 handmade sun-baked loam bricks. They
are separated by a 7 metre floor space constructed from the same materials as
the walls[11].
There are many “imperfections” found at the site such as the almost ubiquitous
cowpats left there by the herds which visited the site daily. The howling winds
which surge through and around the walls can be deafening. Once in a while, one
can hear the odd bird call, a lowing cow or the distant farm machinery. As one
strolls through the site, the sounds come together to suggest a confluence of
nature and man-make phenomenon around us even in such rural settings as Tango.
Akio Suzuki’s intentions are thus not so much of a rejection of human agency
and modernisation in a simplistic fashion but instead Suzuki is presenting to
us a conundrum of the nature-versus-human essentialism of man. With regards to
Suzuki’s nature-based works, his good friend and writer in Japan, Shin
Nakagawa, wrote that, “The act of listening to Nature while at the same time
destroying Nature forms an interesting contrast[12].”
For one to go back to Nature and rejecting human agency, in fact, still
involves actively, the agency of man on the chosen site of return.
Akio
Suzuki’s sound art and works therefore stemmed from his understanding of the
dilemma of modern Japan as well as modern society as a whole. This explains why
his works are simultaneously parochial and universal in its message and
therefore in the 1980s when he participated in Documenta 8 (Kassel, 1987), he
received rapturous response from all in attendance. While we go back to nature
to embrace it we are still interfering with it. When one critiques the process
of modernisation and its supposed ills, one needs to realise the inevitability
of human agency on this planet. Suzuki’s relatively understated comments on the
world via his sound art is thus thought-provoking and they force us to delve
deeper into the interconnectedness of things and to see beyond the
black-and-white of things which most people are so conveniently latching onto
when critiquing the world around them[13].
He is thus not providing a didactical answer but through his works we can
perhaps be triggered to contemplate a bit more: humans are maybe too
egotistical to lay all blame on human agency as Nature often fights back or
react to us in mysterious ways which we can never predict. We are but one with
nature after all.
Taking
Technology by its horns: The many tales of Yasunao Tone
Yasunao
Tone was born in 1935 in Tokyo, Japan. He thus witnessed the
atrocities of the war in close proximity when the Allied planes carpet bombed
Tokyo on a daily basis towards the end of the war. The surrender of Japan after
the dropping of the two horrifying atomic bombs and the subsequent events in
Japan and its initial hellish existence in the first post-war years was
experienced first-hand by Tone. However like many who grew up and were being exposed
to the influx of Western ideas and books in the 1950s provided creative and
cultural fuel for him and many to embrace modernism. Neither a trained musician
nor artist, Tone went to Chiba University to study literature[14].
This did not stop him from exploiting the world around him for creative ends.
He first dived into “music” making but of a Surrealist and Abstract
Expressionist type.
“We
thought… our improvisational performance could be a form of automatic writing,
in a sense that the drip painting of Jackson Pollock was a form of automatic
writing.”
He
formed the music group, Group Ongaku in the 1950s with his fellow enthusiasts
and an archival CD/LP of the group was released in recent years which
shocked many as their pieces sounded like the works of equivalent outfits in
Euro-America like AMM, MEV and Gruppo Di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza
(which featured renown film composer Ennio Morricone) but Tone and company were
way earlier than the rest of them[15].
Group Ongaku’s counterparts in the west were all formed in the mid to late
1960s and this provides ample evidence challenging the common historical
narrative that the west has always been the avant-garde in modern arts and
culture.
Tone
also linked up with the who’s who of the Japanese art and music avant-garde in
the late 1950s and 1960s: Takehisa Kosugi (who founded the acclaimed
performance group Taj Mahal Travellers in the 1970s as well as serving his
residence as music director of Merce Cunningham Dance Company later that decade),
Yoko Ono, infamous Japanese performance art group Hi Red Centre and avant-garde
composer Ichiyanagi Toshi (who amongst many, worked with John Cage and polymath
poet, director and playwright Shuji Terayama)[16].
He was involved in the Hi Red Centre anti-Olympic performance piece during the
Tokyo Olympics of 1964, Cleaning Piece, which saw him and all
participated and posed as street cleaners in the business district of Ginza,
stopping traffic for three hours and in fact receiving cooperation from the
unknowing police[17]. Tone
was working and collaborating actively in a milieu which demonstrates rabid
inter-disciplinary intent and even border-erasing outcomes which had clear
resonance with the utopian and counter-cultural fervour felt by so many artists
in both Japan and the West during the 1960s.
Suzuki
was also a key member of Fluxus Japan and he contributed tapes and scores to
Fluxus founder George Maciunas and he was involved in the performances of
Fluxus pieces in Japan in the 1960s and in New York later on. His penchant for
irreverence prompted him to comment in recent years that Fluxus was only
properly historically meaningful from 1962-66, and that while the works are
being exhibited in the museums today, to him it meant that these works are being
stripped of their original intentions and functions of being handled and played
by both the artists and the audiences[18].
The same spirit gleaned here is similar to Tone’s artistic purpose and the conceptualisation
of his sound art which he started creating since the 1960s. His disdain and
questioning of modern technology in the post-World-War-II world of today and
the associated techno-fetish of modern society to any new fanged media/technology
basically served as fodder for his deconstruction and re-conceptualisation of
some of these technological products in his sound art.
Despite
Tone’s key role in the various contemporary art fields since the 1950s, he was
a relative unknown figure until recently. This was due to the fact that his
works from the 1950s to the 1970s were largely transient-based happenings and
performance pieces. It was also due to the fact that Tone was residing far away
from the world cultural capitals i.e. the west that he suffered from the more
Euro-American biased focus on Fluxus, the Happenings and related art movements
in Euro-America by critics and historians in those years. Only when he went to
New York in the 1970s, and also with the advent of improved recording technologies
in sound and video, Tone was more willing and was thus enabled to document his
works.
Tone’s
most famous work is his mid-1980s “wounded CDs”. The direct
inspiration of this phase of his works was a book entitled Science Seminar For The Familiar[19].
The part which captured Tone’s imagination was a chapter on digital recording,
which highlighted to him the error correction programme in CD players which
kicks in if a one is misread as zero in the machine’s binary codes. Since the
error creates a totally different sound, unknown of, he then embarked on a path
to override the error correcting system. Eventually, he was suggested by a
friend to put Scotch tape with many pinholes in it on the CD itself[20].
The
initial impressions one gets upon hearing the outcomes when these “wounded” CDs
are played in the machines are that of typical CD skipping/malfunctioning due
to surface blemishes. The actual mechanism behind, however, is more than that.
As Tone shares, “… numbers are altered so it becomes totally different
information. The Scotch tape enables me to make burst errors without
significantly affecting the system and stopping the machine[21].”
Tone’s interventions in the process of the readings of CDs are actually acts of
creative noise. By disrupting the machines which are supposed to be the state
of the art technology back in the 1980s when the world was moving from the
analogue to the digital in many fields of everyday science, Tone successfully
questions and re-inscribes the supposed prescribed workings of an increasingly
ordered (albeit big corporation-dictated/sponsored) contemporaneity of the
triumphant neo-liberal capitalist paradigm.
Tone
wants to interrogate the triumphalism of new scientific and technological “breakthroughs”
in the post-War years. With every new product such as this, the media and the
corporations together will seemingly snap into a frenzy to valorise the
“invincibility” of the product. The fascination with the new and
technologically clued-in perpetuates the wave after wave of consumer craze to
overturn the existing goods to embrace the new with scant sense of deeper
consideration. For example, when the 12-inch vinyl album appeared in the market
in the 1960s, it swiftly overtook the previously dominant 7-inch vinyl single
format. And when CDs were introduced into the market in the 1980s with the
promise amongst many, of its longer playtime, the needlessness to flip the disc
over after 20 minutes and of course the purportedly indestructible nature of
the CD sent the consumer markets all over to discard the vinyl format to the
small shiny plastic discs. Tone’s experiments question this notion head-on: are
new technologies necessarily better? He seems to be probing a deeper issue of
that of an uncritical celebration of contemporary scientism and modernisation
around the world.
To bring
his irreverence for technology up-to-date, Tone ventures into interrogating the
next big thing in recent years – MP3 files. In 2009, Tone started collaborating
with a team of the New Aesthetics in Computer Music (NACM) at Music Research
Centre at the University of York in UK in 2009[22].
Tone wished to develop new software based on the disruption of the MP3.
Originally Tone wanted to explore the intervention of the MP3 as reproducing
device by interfering with the interface across its main elements (the ones and
zeros), the compression encoder and decoder. However the initial outcomes were
unsatisfactory.
Then
Tone and his team discovered that by corrupting the sound file in the MP3
format, it would lead to the generation of error messages which could be utilised
to assign various lengths of samples automatically. By combining the different
playing speeds of the samples, it could produce unpredictable and unknowable
sound. To further enrich the software, Tone’s team also incorporates other
possible elements into the software like flipping stereo channels and phasing
ranges which would produce different pitches and timbres[23].
Tone
used the software as a performance art tool several times at the MRC at the
University of York. He has since also performed in public in Kyoto, Japan, in
May 2009 as well as New York City in 2010 and many more subsequent events lined
up. He has also produced a CD documenting his performances of his pieces using
the said software.
While
the conceptualisation and eventual production/utilisation of the software might
be as irreverent as Tone’s wounded CDs but it is consistent with Tone’s subtle
but consistent socio-political critique and his artistic harnessing of the
latest consumer-based technology. Even though the first converting, uploading
and sharing of MP3 files of existing CDs into the internet in the mid-1990s
began more as an act of wilful rebellion, Tone wants to examine the by-now
ubiquitous format on which contemporary life is based upon – the ones and zeros
head on. In fact, MP3 format not only allows the ease of transfer and sharing
of data but it is almost physically empty except for its physical carriers and
vehicles like computer hard disks, mobile phones and the Cloud. While like most
other consumer-based technologies, MP3 or its other extant formats like MP4,
Lossless, etc., seems to be used by people as medium of consumption of everyday
life for their hectic and often dreary existence, most do not see the often
possible misuse and abuse of technologies to break out of the by-now big
corporate push of gadgets leveraging on such formats to churn out products
endlessly.
Tone
and his team recognise the potential of the MP3 to be distorted and
reconfigured for creative purposes in music and performance art fields. He
wants to demonstrate that modern society can and should break out of the
passive consumption of technological products and question and thus create
using the seemingly static use of modern technology. Tone’s art projects belie
the belief that reclaiming the role of an individual and conversely the society
to not be enslaved by their new gadgets and toys but to interrogate them and
abuse them innovatively.
Yasunao
Tone is thus an artistic humanist who is concerned with not only the society
and politics of Japan or his immediate surroundings. It is always an on-going
search and re-creation for a more considered human perception and re-think of the
relevance and role of science and technology today. His message and agenda is
about alerting us to be always circumspective about the impact of technology on
all human life at the end of the day.
Conclusion
Yasunao
Tone and Akio Suzuki seem to come from two very different and even opposing
rationales towards their art making. However they are both very interested in
the tension of humanity, technological advancement and the natural world we all
live in today. The recent nuclear and natural disasters in 2011 in Japan were
an alarm for all: despite all our advancement in the sciences, we are still at
the mercy of nature as well as our own human-driven scientific follies. Suzuki
shows us the way back to nature, but he does not romanticise it. In fact, he
highlights the irony between humankind embracing and destroying nature
concurrently in whatever we do. Tone on the other hand, leads us into the core
of new scientific products and deconstructs them to reveal to us the
blind-spots we have towards technology. Their projects are not about the local
society and its parochial views and politics but they are actually about the
society and politics of all human kind. In other words, something more
universal and all-encompassing.
Bibliography
Adlington, Robert (ed.) Sound Commitments: Avant-garde Music and the
Sixties. New York: Oxford University
Press,
2009.
Cope, Julian. Japrocksampler. London: Bloomsbury
Publishing, 2007.
Kelly, Caleb (ed.). Sound. London & Cambridge, MA:
Whitechapel Gallery & The MIT Press, 2011.
Kim-Cohen, Seth. In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a
Non-cochlear Sonic Art. London: Continuum Books, 2009.
Kopf, Biba. “Global Ear:
Tango/Sapporo”The Wire issue 239
January 2004 14. London: The Wire, 2004.
LaBelle, Brandon. Background Noise Perspectives on Sound Art.
London: Continuum Books, 2010.
LaBelle, Brandon and Steve
Roden (eds.). Site of Sound: Of
Architecture & the Ear. Los Angeles & Santa
Monica: Errant
Bodies Press & Smart Art Press, 1999.
Licht, Alan. “Yasunao Tone –
Random Tone Burst” in The Wire issue
223 September 2002 30-33. London: The
Wire, 2002.
Migone, Christof. Sonic Somatic: Performance of the Unsound
Body. Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press, 2012.
Munroe, Alexandra. Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the
Sky. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994.
Suzuki, Akio. K7 Box (CD). ALM Records/Kojima
Recordings, Inc. 2007.
Suzuki, Akio. Odds and Ends (2xCD). Hören 2002.
Tone, Yasunao. MP3 Deviations #6+7 (CD). Editions Mego
2011.
Tone, Yasunao. Yasunao Tone (CD). Asphodel 2003.
Toop, David. “Akio Suzuki –
Acoustic Trickster” in The Wire issue
231 May 2003. London: The Wire, 2003.
Toop, David. “On Location –
Akio Suzuki: London School of Oriental and African Studies UK” in The Wire issue
218 April 2002. London: The Wire, 2002.
Various. Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language. Los
Angeles: Errant Bodies Press, 2007.
Various. Around by Soundpocket 1 Programme
Catalogue. Hong Kong: Soundpocket, 2010.
Yang, Yeung (ed.). Pocket: 1 – Around. Hong Kong:
Soundpocket, 2010.
[1]
For more please see: Caleb Kelly (ed.) , Sound,
London/Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery/The MIT Press, 2011; Brandon LaBelle,
Background Noise Perspectives on Sound
Art, London: Continuum Books, 2010; and Seth Kin-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear – Toward a
Non-cochlear Sonic Art, London: Continuum Books, 2009.
[2]
Please refer to: Brandon LaBelle & Steve Roden (eds.), Site of Sound: Of Architecture & the Ear, Los Angeles/Santa
Monica: Errant Bodies Press/Smart Art Press, 1999; Christof Migone, Sonic Somatic, Los Angeles: Errant
Bodies Press, 2012 and footnote 1.
[3]
Julian Cope, Japrocksampler, London:
Bloomsbury, 2007, pp.23-40.
[4]
Ibid., pp.41-72.
[5]
For more details see Alexandra Munroe, Japanese Art After 1945 – Scream Against The Sky, New York: Harry
N. Abrams, 1994.
[6]
David Toop, “Akio Suzuki – Acoustic Trickster” in The Wire issue 231 May 2003, p.12.
[7]
Ibid.
[8]
Ibid.
[9]
Ibid.
[10]
Ibid.
[11]
Biba Kopf, “Global Ear: Tango/Sapporo” in The
Wire issue 239 January 2004, p.14.
[12]
Ibid.
[13]
Akio Suzuki, “Akio Suzuki” in Yang, Yeung (ed.), Pocket: 1 – Around, Hong Kong: Soundpocket, 2010, p.82.
[14]
Alan Licht, “Yasunao Tone - Random Tone Bursts” in The Wire issue 223 September 2002, p.31.
[15]
Ibid.
[16]
William A. Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music group and Yasunao Tone’s
early work” in Various, Yasunao Tone:
Noise Media Language, Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press, 2007, pp. 13-33.
[17]
Cope, pp.54-57.
[18]
Licht, p.31.
[19]
Licht, p.32.
[20]
Ibid.
[21]
Ibid.
[22]
Yasunao Tone, in sleevenotes to CD album, MP3
Deviations #6+7.
[23]
Ibid.
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